"What brought the boy sitting here?" she muttered on a sudden.
"Jack Patten?"
Mistress Gridley nodded with a strange look in her eyes. "Ay, little Jack. And he had three whinberries in his hand," she continued in the same hushed tone. "Look about, if you are not afraid. Find the whinberries, and something may come of it!"
He did not understand, but he saw she was in deadly earnest; and he was a coward, and afraid of her. "The whinberries?" he stammered, edging a pace away from her. "What of them?"
"They are our gold cups," she muttered between fear and rage. "The child has bewitched them."
Gridley cried out "Nonsense." But all the same he looked quickly over his shoulder. The sun was high and gave him courage. "The child?" he said; "why, I have known him from his birth!"
"Find the whinberries!" was all the answer she vouchsafed. And she pointed imperatively to the ground. "Find them, I say, if you are not afraid, man."
He went down on his knees and began to search. But the earth he had thrown out of the hole lay thick on the ground, and he failed to find even one of them. He rose, and told the woman so; and she nodded as if she had expected the answer.
He shuddered at that. He saw her afraid, and he knew she feared few things. Besides, she had all the influence over him which a strong mind is sure to possess over a weak one. Seeing her afraid he grew fearful also. Though he did not believe, he trembled. He remembered how strangely the boy had looked at him, how obstinately he had refused to speak, what an odd persistence he had shown in clinging to that spot. Yet how had the boy known? How had he found the place?
Doubtfully he put that thought into words, and got his answer. "How did he get out of the wood closet when I locked him in last night?" Mistress Gridley asked contemptuously. "I left the door locked when I went to bed, and the boy inside. I found the door locked this morning, but the boy was in his own bed. That is not canny."